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CHICO, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 13: Christina Taft looks at photos of her mother, Victoria Taft, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018, at her apartment near California State University, Chico. Her mother died at home in Paradise, Calif., one of the 86 who perished in the Camp Fire. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

CHICO, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 13: Christina Taft holds a photograph of her mother, Victoria Taft, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018, at her apartment near California State University, Chico. Her mother died at her home in Paradise, Calif., one of the 86 who perished in the Camp Fire. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

Victoria Taft holds her daughter, Christina Taft, on the day she was born in 1993. (Contributed — Christina Taft)

Victoria Taft and Christina Taft. (Contributed — Christina Taft)

Victoria Taft and Christina Taft. (Contributed — Christina Taft)

The card from Victoria Taft to her daughter Christina Taft on her 23rd birthday. (Contributed — Christina Taft)

Victoria Taft’s head shots from Studio City in 1990. (Contributed — Christina Taft)

CHICO, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 13: Christina Taft talks about her mother, Victoria Taft, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018, at her apartment near California State University, Chico. Her mother died at home in Paradise, Calif., one of the 86 who perished in the Camp Fire. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

CHICO, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 13: Christina Taft holds a photograph of her mother, Victoria Taft, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018, at her apartment near California State University, Chico. Her mother died at her home in Paradise, Calif., one of the 86 who perished in the Camp Fire. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

They argued about the neighbor, showering, paying the phone bill, packing the safe, talking to a woman named Mary, the bumper-to-bumper traffic outside, the severity of the fire and God.

They argued over evacuating.

Christina Taft fled Paradise with tens of thousands of others who managed to escape the path of the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history. Her mother, Victoria Taft, stayed.

It was the last time they would see each other.

The Camp Fire roared to life on Nov. 8 around 6:30 a.m. near Pulga. By 8 a.m., the inferno had ripped across the Concow Valley and burned into Paradise, consuming the earth at the rate of a football field each second. Alice Blair, the only neighbor Christina and Victoria knew, knocked on their apartment door around 8:30 a.m. to warn them to get out. Blair’s granddaughter had seen flames approaching while driving to work and called to urge her to evacuate.

There were no official calls, door knocks or evacuation alerts — just Blair’s warning. Elliott and Copeland roads, where the duplex they lived in sat, were quiet. Christina said she saw police drive by, but they didn’t say anything to anyone.

She hopped in the shower. Her mother stayed in her pajamas, picked up the phone to talk to a friend named Mary who lived in town and wasn’t evacuating, and sat down to pay the AT&T bill.

Her mother began to lightly pack then stopped. Christina told her to look at the traffic and darkness outside. Victoria took a quick glance.

“Well, you took a shower,” she replied facetiously.

Christina packed the car, cursed and talked about the gravity of the situation. Victoria didn’t like that, so they fought.

“She just wanted me to be quiet,” Christina said. “She was recoiling… In denial… Didn’t think it was going to be that bad and said I needed to calm down.”

Christina continued packing. Victoria still wanted to wait until noon — or until they heard word from an official.

She handed Christina a jacket, some squash soup, pillows, an umbrella and her phone book. Christina grabbed photos, tubs with documents in them, clothes and the safe.

Victoria looked for her birth certificate to give to Christina, but couldn’t find it. Instead, she handed her an ID that expired nearly 10 years ago — before she partially lost her vision and had to stop driving.

Then the power went out.

Victoria lit candles and Christina blew them out. Her mother just lit more and stayed on the phone with Mary.

Feeling defeated, Christina left. She turned on her headlights and drove away around 10 a.m. She later learned the blaze had ravaged her home and claimed her mother’s life sometime between 11 a.m. and noon.

The drive

Much was said within those 90 minutes. Christina replayed the fight in her mind as she drove to Chico. She was angry and frustrated, yet the overwhelming feeling that she should’ve turned around to force her mother out of the apartment and into the car consumed her.

“I didn’t give enough time, I was seriously packing up the car with all of this stuff — it was completely full and not enough of her stuff really,” she said. “And then she didn’t want me to take her laptop, like ‘No don’t touch that…Don’t touch the suitcase!’”

She blasted music in the car so she wouldn’t think, but there was one thought she couldn’t shake.

“I probably wouldn’t see her again,” she said as her voice broke. “… And that was it.”

She drove from Copeland Road to Nunneley Road to Pearson Road to Skyway. Vehicles crawled in gridlock traffic. She couldn’t turn the car around.

“I had a chance to save her and I just didn’t do it,” Christina said.

The Tafts

They lived their whole lives together — just them two.

Christina, 25, is a business major at Chico State University and is expecting to graduate next fall. Her mother, though listed as Victoria Taft in reports of those who died in the Camp Fire, was known as Vicki by everyone.

Vicki, 66, was a stay-at-home mom. She was born Nov. 11, 1951 in Pennsylvania, but grew up in Los Angeles.

Her family was immersed in the entertainment industry. Vicki’s mother did some modeling and her father was a cameraman. Her half-brother was a screenwriter.

She attended UCLA but never finished. She worked in real estate, and was an actress and a stunt double until she got injured on the set of “Dick Tracy” around 1989.

Her IMDB page says she is known for her roles in the 1991 film “Checkered Flag” and the 1981 film “Malibu Hot Summer,” which also featured Kevin Costner. But, Vicki often wouldn’t share the details of her past life with Christina. She would simply say she didn’t remember.

When they moved to Paradise in 2008 after spending 12 years in Arizona and three in Southern California, Vicki joined the Lions Club for a time and enjoyed making friends at the free church lunches in town.

Vicki liked to watch old sitcoms — mainly comedies and romances, anything lighthearted. She was the type of person who would draw smiley faces on the manager’s rent envelopes.

She would research things online and could talk for hours on the phone. Often, she would leave notes around the house of things she had to do or even just thoughts. She wrote a book titled “Tara” once, Christina remembered, and enjoyed writing cards.

“We may have our ups and downs and all arounds but deep in my heart I’ll always love you and cherish you!” Vicki scrawled in a card to Christina for her 23rd birthday.

It now hurts to see her mother’s handwriting on cards and the backs of photos she managed to save.

For Christina’s 25th birthday — less than a month before the fire — Vicki ordered a Hawaiian pizza and stuck a candle in it because Christina didn’t like cake.

It would’ve been Vicki’s birthday three days after the fire started.

They were never apart for long periods of time. Christina tried to move out once for six months in the fall of 2013 — it didn’t work for Vicki. She missed her daughter, so Christina moved back in.

They would sometimes fight, especially when Vicki would rearrange things in Christina’s room or when Christina would suggest they move to Southern California, but she had never seen her mother recoil the way she did when they argued over evacuating.

Especially because it wasn’t the first time they had to do so.

In 2008, the Humboldt Fire swept through southern Paradise and burned from Highway 32 across Skyway. It scorched 23,344 acres and destroyed 87 homes, but no one died. It was the same year Christina and Victoria had moved to Paradise into a place on Skyway.

“The first time it was her getting me out,” Christina said. “But it was 10 years ago and she could drive and could see and we had calls to leave.”

There were no calls this time.

While her mother was social outside the house, they mainly kept to themselves. They didn’t have any family in Paradise to call and warn them like their neighbor’s granddaughter had.

“By not having many friends or family, we were more at risk of dying,” Christina said. “It was all on us to find out what was going on.”

The search

The drive to Chico took nearly two hours. Once in the city limits, Christina pulled over to the side of the road and frantically started calling 9-1-1 to get help for her mother.

The Butte County Sheriff’s Office logged her call at 1:26 p.m. It listed that her mother was on Copeland Road, blind, unable to drive and would need to be transported out.

Christina said she tried calling 9-1-1 for six hours.

“I told them she had disabilities and they were like, ‘Why didn’t she leave?’” She said. “She didn’t know it was a mandatory evacuation and they were questioning me on why she didn’t go.”

Every time she would explain why her mother didn’t go with her, Christina would become more frustrated. She began to text her friends to say that her mother was probably going to die.

She soon met up with a friend she had made at the university. With her mother’s expired ID in hand, Christina went searching for Vicki at the evacuation shelters and put her on the missing list.

Around 6 p.m., on the way to the Oroville Nazarene Church shelter, they saw a California Highway Patrol officer on the side of the road. She pulled over to ask him for help. He called her evacuation request into the command post.

“I didn’t realize you could only do it in person or they wouldn’t care,” she said. “I realized that too, but you know too late…Hours too late.”

They checked the last shelter around 10 p.m. — nearly 12 hours after Christina had left Vicki behind. There, Christina said she could feel her mother’s waves of energy around her.

She knew her mother was dead. Her friend told her to keep looking.

Christina received a call a few days later from Alhambra County officials to go in for a DNA swab — remains had been found on the property.

The call

Thanksgiving morning was when Christina was told the remains found on the property matched her DNA. But officials wouldn’t tell her if they were found inside or outside of their apartment.

There were two calls.

She was driving to Nevada City to spend Thanksgiving with a Paradise adopt-a-family when officials first called her to confirm the DNA match. The second call — though Christina doesn’t fully remember it — was to confirm Vicki’s time of death.

Officials told her they suspected the fire had hit Copeland Road between 11 a.m. and noon.

“I only had one to two hours to get her out,” Christina said. “When I was calling it was pointless because it was too late anyway.”

Vicki’s name was released on the fatality list the Monday after. Christina still didn’t know if her mother had died inside or outside of their apartment.

It was only in person that she saw the caution tape roping off a block of the space where her mother’s body was found. It was where their living room once was, Christina said. Probably by the window.

“She probably couldn’t get out,” she said. “It was disgusting imagining her dying.”

The return

Vicki liked Paradise. After living there for 10 years, she didn’t want to leave.

“She would’ve been fine with just me and her, her whole life and I was getting to be fine with that too and then this happened,” Christina said.

She went up to Paradise twice to see the remains of their two-bedroom apartment and doesn’t want to go back.

“There’s nothing there,” she said.

All that was left in the rubble of the apartment they had lived in for seven years were broken cups — including one that had “love” written on it. Christina had given it to Vicki as a gift for her birthday or Mother’s Day.

There was also the caution tape.

“Twice is enough,” she said.

The life after

Christina’s memory of Nov. 8 and her conversation with her mother a month later is sparse. But, she thinks about it constantly and runs through scenarios of what she could have done to get her mother to evacuate.

She could’ve disconnected the phone. She could’ve called 9-1-1. She could’ve said, “I love you, I don’t want you to die — begging her.”

The first two weeks she was angry with law enforcement officials for not doing enough. The second two weeks she began to blame herself.

“80 percent of me was saying no and then that 20 percent that wanted to just run away and think about myself won,” Christina said. “Now it’s just that 80 percent of me that’s just dying inside every day.”

Days following the fire, Christina watched and read reports of people fighting off the fire with hoses and surviving. She saw videos of people driving through raging flames and surviving. She said she didn’t know she could do that.

“I thought if fire got in the street, you’d die right then, but apparently not with all these other people staying with fire in their yards,” she said. “It’s my fault that I didn’t stay.

“Everyone says no, but I was responsible for her…They got their people out — their family out — and I just left.”

Christina now spends most days getting to know her mother. She reached out to her estranged half-uncle in Arizona, Vicki’s friends, and searched for movies she was in. Most recently, she watched “Malibu Hot Summer.”

“I had asked her before and she said no she wasn’t in it,” Christina said as she cracked a half smile. “I watched it and it was her — just thinner and younger, you know?”

Christina is staying at University Village until May — thanks to a donation from a Chico State business program alumnus — but she will need to find a place to stay while she finishes her degree in the fall.

After graduation, she wants to move to Southern California or Arizona and maybe work to develop an emergency communication platform prototype to improve centralized communication during emergencies. She wants to name it after her mother.

Often, she is busy gathering resources or going to school. At first, her financial situation made her feel insecure, she said, but now she mostly feels guilt.

“I left my mom there and she died, that is the worst thing I could have ever done,” Christina said. “I’m going to regret this my entire life.”

The memorial

They never talked about what Christina would do if her mother died.

“It was just her and me,” she said. “She didn’t have insurance or any of that stuff — we thought it was creepy. She didn’t expect to die.”

A memorial is scheduled for Jan. 12, 2019. East Lawn, a memorial and mortuary service in Sacramento, donated their cremation and memorial services. Cremation was always what Vicki’s family had done and Christina doesn’t want to leave her mother in Butte County when she leaves after graduation.

Many people have been helping her plan the services, but it is difficult for her to process the details.

“That was really hard for me to look at and finalize it,” she said. “I want my mom back all the time constantly and I can’t do anything — it’s a nightmare.”

Christina doesn’t know who will come to the memorial — her half-uncle and some adopt-a-family friends in Sacramento might. Vicki’s phone book is full of first-name-only entries, making it difficult to find her friends. Some aren’t in the phone book, including Mary, the last person Vicki probably talked to on the phone that day.

The memorial in Sacramento will be a tribute to Vicki’s life. Christina also wants to have one in Chico in the spring for her mother’s friends in Paradise to attend. She wants her mother to be remembered through photos and stories — even though it won’t bring her back.

“She’d rather be alive than sit in articles, she’d want to just be with me — alive,” Christina said. “She had things to do, she had a life.”

If the Camp Fire hadn’t happened, Vicki Taft would have turned 67 that weekend. She would have seen her daughter graduate, get married and have grandchildren — she had already bought the baby clothes.

Christina’s eyes welled with tears. She had forgotten about the baby clothes — but now they were gone too.